Social media fiction Designing Stories for Community Engagement Francesca Piredda1, Mariana Ciancia2, Simona Venditti3 1,2,3 Design Department, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
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Abstract. The current widespread use of digital videos, pictures, audio and text, and their distribution across social media leads to the rise of new consumption behaviours and the spread of new interactive narrative forms. These issues are considered with the analysis of the results of the workshop "Micro Narratives for Community Engagement", which is part of an ongoing research and educational programme about social media narratives and transmedia storytelling for community engagement. The aim of the workshop was to examine the structure of social media feeds as new ways of organising content based on storytelling and sense-making. Keywords: mobile storytelling, social media storytelling, interactive narrative, design and new media, community-centred design, narratology
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Introduction
In the contemporary media landscape, audience consumption is witnessing the rise of new behaviours and the spread of new interactive narrative forms, which rely not only on developments in technology but also on spontaneous practices of engagement. The remarkable acceleration in technological developments has been leading society to interact with a digital version of reality via several devices i.e. “the increased centrality of the mobilized and virtual gaze as a fundamental feature of everyday life” [14]. Nevertheless, it is cultural values that drive changes within media consumption behaviours. Thus, as noted by Jenkins, Ford and Green [18] “a media system is more than simply the technologies that support it”. As a matter of fact, while historically user interaction was related mainly to technology, in recent decades it has depended much more on the time and space people are willing to devote to content. Starting from the concept of Packer and Jordan [28], Castells [7] describes the communication scenario as being composed of five processes (integration, interactivity, hypermedia, immersion and narrativity). On the one hand, we are addressing the integration of languages and media to develop new expressive forms characterised by non-linear story structures (narrativity). On the other hand, we accept Jenkins’ contribution to the concept proposed by Packer and Jordan, drawing a distinction between interactivity and participation. Jenkins defined interactivity as “the way that
